Thursday, April 5, 2012

Laughing Through Tears, CLP-in-Chief Edition

It is, perhaps, not a strange circumstance that the Constitutional law scholar-in-Chief's attitude toward the Supreme Court, which may or (horrors!) may not approve of his pet project, Obamacare, is seen with exceptional clarity through the eyes of cartoonists such as Investor's Business Daily's Michael Ramirez, who placed Harvard Law School-educated Emperor Obama in the dunce's seat for failure to recognize one of this nation's essential founding legal decisions, or Hope n' Change's Stilton Jarlsberg, who wrote:

In a rose garden speech, the man who taught Constitutional law at the now thoroughly discredited University of Chicago petulantly announced that this so-called Supreme Court would be taking an "unprecedented, extraordinary step" if they overturn a law which was enacted by Congress.

Which, of course, is one of the primary responsibilities the Supreme Court was assigned when the body was created in the Constitution (which Obama hasn't actually read, but has "heard a lot about"). And far from being an unprecedented or extraordinary step, the Supreme Court has struck down over 150 laws deemed to not be Constitutional, and has done so for over 200 years now.

But the shocks did not end there for the president. Because with a look of slack-jawed, baffled outrage, he announced his discovery that the members of the Supreme Court are "an unelected group of people," implying that they lack the moral authority that comes from being answerable to voters.

Oh, really...?

Because the dark, ugly heart throbbing at the center of Obamacare is the Independent Payment Advisory Board - known as IPAB to the politically correct, and as The Death Panel to realists. This is Obama's 15-member board of unelected people who will decide what medical treatments the government will and won't pay for, and who will (and importantly, who won't) get treatment. These are the unaccountable individuals who will take Obama's euthanistic threat to pass out painkillers instead of pacemakers and give it the power of law. Law which is specifically not subject to review by any court.

Supposedly, it's the "unelected" status of the IPAB members which Obama heralds as making them more fair than any political body could be - which is the exact opposite of the president's criticism of the Supreme Court.

That's the kind of logic that earns one a position as President of the Harvard Law Review and Senior Lecturer of the University of Chicago Law School--two academic hiring decisions now earning so many belly laughs (and gasps of horror) throughout the country that even Eric Holder has been obliged to throw in the towel with this statement:

The power of the courts to review the constitutionality of legislation is beyond dispute.